It wasn’t till I read Elizabeth Longford’s Introduction (after the story itself) that I realised this is a sequel (of sorts) to Mitchison’s The Corn King and the Spring Queen – apparently the best historical novel of the twentieth century – which is on my tbr pile but a much bulkier volume than this one so I had passed on it as yet. I must admit I was slightly annoyed to have read them out of sequence but Travel Light can stand alone. It is, though, a fantasy rather than a straight historical novel, the tale of Halla Bearsbairn, later Halla Heroesbane, and later again Halla Godsgift, born the daughter of a king of Novgorod whose second wife persuades him to get rid of her. She is saved by her nurse who turns into a bear and takes Halla into the woods where the bears are waking from their winter sleep. Halla spends the year with them picking up bear ways but is too lively for them as they begin to hibernate and so is adopted by the dragon Uggi as part of his treasure, most of which is kept at the back of his cave. Encounters with Norse heroes and Steinvor, a red-headed Valkyrie, suggest this may all be a Norse-based fantasy but events conspire to force Halla to leave. She has an encounter with the All-Father who tells her to travel light. She does, down the Volga to the Black Sea and the town of Marob, then sailing to Byzantium which the Norse had known as Micklegard. The bulk of the book is spent in this environment where Halla learns to navigate the ways of the human world, realising among other things that the emperor is merely a man not the near-mythical entity she had previously supposed. Halla’s ability to communicate with animals comes in handy for betting on the results at the Hippodrome and procuring the money needed for her friends from Marob to petition the court. Halla’s detachment from her human interlocutors, her air of wafting through the proceedings means that we never really feel a sense of jeopardy on her behalf, her other-wordliness, which might have been a danger, is a coat of protection. Along with this, in Travel Light, Mitchison also plays tricks with time.

The book is an example of Mitchison’s interest in other times and places, compare Blood of the Martyrs, and I did wonder about the significance or otherwise of the name which results when Halla is spelled in reverse.

My attention has recently been drawn to this website which refers to research in which – albeit limited – data analysis reveals there are only 6 plots (or emotional arcs) into which most works of fiction fit.

Insights of this sort are not entirely new. Others have had similar thoughts.

This clip of Kurt Vonnegut talking about the shapes of different stories is delightful.

A foreigner turns up to the court of the Mughal Emperor, Akbar, at Fatehpur Sikri with a claim to be related to him and a tale to tell to justify it. The foreigner has called himself variously Uccello di Firenze, Mogor dell’ Amore (the Mughal of love) and Niccolò Vespucci. So begins this typical piece of Rushdian flamboyance.

Containing elements of fable, fairy tale and Rushdie’s usual dose of magic realism (among other things Akbar has managed to conjure up for himself an imaginary – and therefore perfect – wife) there is nevertheless something about the treatment that does not quite hit the mark. Rushdie has always been fond of digression, word games and allusions (in this case, for example, take the mercenaries Otho, Botho, Clotho and D’Artagnan) but it has to be said; in amongst the showing here, there is a lot of telling. As if to underline this there is a list of works consulted for research given in a bibliography.

Yet, as the author notes, “The untruth of untrue stories could sometimes be of service in the real world.” That is what fiction is for after all. But then again, “Those sceptics who by virtue of their sour temperament resist a supernatural account of events may prefer more conventional explanations.” Indeed.

It might seem, too, that in a novel entitled The Enchantress of Florence that the woman concerned could be expected to appear in the narrative somewhat earlier than two-thirds of the way through but while this is her story it is also the story of Akbar, of the Florence of the Medici (and the monk Giralomo,) and of three friends from that city, Antonino Argalia, last of the condottieri, Niccolò – ‘il Machia’ – Machiavelli (yes, that Machiavelli) and Agostino Vespucci (cousin to Amerigo.) It is also the tale of why the Mughal court had to leave Fatehpur Sikri.

The enchantress is Qara Köz, “Lady Black Eyes,” Akbar’s Great Aunt, sister of Babar the first Mughal, eliminated from the family history when she rejected a return from capture. Her enchantments seem to lie in the ability to entrance men, if only for a while. Her destiny is to pass through the hands of a warlord, to the Safavid Shah Ismail, to Antonino Argalia and finally to the New World with Agostino Vespucci. She has a companion, her mirror in all respects (bar one.) Yet she is an absence in the book, an emptiness around which Rushdie weaves his tale of folly, wisdom, hope and loss. Akbar is at the heart of it, a ruler wise to his surroundings and to the machinations of the power hungry. There is a barbed inversion of insular Western conceptions when Akbar muses that, “The lands of the West were exotic and surreal to a degree incomprehensible to the humdrum people of the East.”

A noteworthy aspect of this edition is that it is endowed with beautiful endpapers picturing at the front a detail from The Building of Fatehpur Sikri Palace from the Akbamama and at the rear from the Carta della Catena showing a panorama of Florence.

Pedant’s corner:- A 16th century Scottish pirate may well have been carrying letters of marque or even diplomatic credentials from Queen Elizabeth (of England) but I doubt he would treasure a locket containing her portrait. Equally he may have boasted of climbing all Scotland’s Munros but not in those terms. They were not named as such for a further three centuries. “I’d keeped her locked up” (keep,) rowboat.

A sonic boom sounds out over Lagos lagoon. Very shortly thereafter three people whose names begin with “A” are taken up by a fist of sea-water and submerged. Some time later they are returned to the beach, as is a creature with the appearance of a woman but who is in fact an alien; an alien who can shift shape. One of our “A”s, Adaora, is a biologist with a lab in her basement and examines the alien, whom she names Ayodele. “Her” cellular structure is totally unlike that of life on Earth, mainly in that it doesn’t have cells, only very small, apparently metal-like, spheres “not fixed together as our cells are.” But Okorafor isn’t interested in this. Her focus is on the effect of the intrusion on Lagos and on its people and on manifestations of Nigerian folk tales/myths. We find out not much more about the aliens than that, apart from being able to read minds and having healing powers, as Ayodele tells the President, “We are technology,” and “we just want a home.”

The other two “A”s, the soldier Agu and the Ghanaian rapper Anthony Dey Craze, and Adaora turn out to have special powers, Agu has extreme strength in his punch, Dey Craze can project sound and Adaora a force field. Adaora’s husband, Chris, who is under the influence of the (nominally) Christian bishop who calls himself Father Oke, already thought Adaora was a witch. In light of this to my mind it undermines the implied criticism of self-serving “charismatic” preachers embedded in Okorafor’s treatment of Oke to have any hint of the supernatural attaching to Adaora.

Ayodele tells Adaora’s two children, “Human beings have a hard time relating to that which does not resemble them. It’s your greatest flaw.”

The Lagos setting is welcome (too often stories of alien invasion focus on the US or Britain) but the move deep into fantasy territory broke my suspension of disbelief. Okorafor’s descriptions are effective but the action scenes can be cursory. By and large the characters are well differentiated, though a few are drawn from the stock cabinet, and we do see a cross-section of Lagos society, some of whom speak in pidgin. This can be understood easily enough (SF readers are used to unfamiliar words and phrases) but the appended glossary will help anyone who struggles.

Lagoon is written in USian (Okorafor is a professor of creative writing at the University of Buffalo, SUNY) so we get dove for dived, upside the head, if worse came to worst, most everyone, asses; which all seemed to me odd usages for a former British colony only 55 years from independence.

Pedant’s corner:- “even before he’d sunken his claws into Chris” (sunk,) “also a bad sign were the two army trucks” (a sign is singular,) “low and behold” (lo,) “to not turn away”. This last is not quite cancelled out by knowing where “not” ought to be placed in “not all was well.”

Valente here has reworked a traditional Russian folk tale, or perhaps several. Lack of familiarity with this source material may obscure some of its nuances but fear not. In what could have been a dizzying whirl through the unfamiliar – we have to deal not only with the tale itself but with the typically Russian patronymics and diminutives – Valente’s writing, with the occasional exception, is fluid and expressive. Her powers of description and similes can be striking, but her Americanisms stand oddly against the novel’s setting.

The story signals its fantastical elements early on. In a house on a long, thin street during the time St Petersburg became Petrograd, then Leningrad – and the street also changed its name twice – Marya Morevna knows there is magic in the world when she sees a bird fall off a tree – “thump, bash!” – change into a man and ask for the girl in the window. Twice more the same thing happens. (As in fairy tales repetition is a key feature of the novel, though the repetitions may have minor changes.) Each manbird takes away one of her three sisters. She then befriends the domoviye (house imps) who hold soviets behind a door in the stove and tell her Papa Koschei is coming.

Marya regrets missing seeing her bird “thump, bash!” into a man. This is Koschei Bessmertny, Koschei the Deathless, the Tsar of life, who nevertheless, in a mechanical vehicle that is also a horse, spirits her away to Buyan, a land where his previous lovers – all called Yelena or Vasilisa – sew soldiers onto cloth and breathe them into life.

In Buyan Koschei’s mother/sister/sometime wife Baba Yaga – relationships there are somewhat involuted – sets Marya tasks to assess her worthiness as a wife for Koschei. These include subduing Baba Yaga’s traditional method of travel, the mortar and pestle. A nice touch during one of these was the scene which is effectively Little Red Riding Hood in reverse. A character Marya befriends in Buyan expresses to her what is perhaps a very Russian sentiment but with universal application, “You will live as you live in any world; with difficulty and grief.” Koschei’s brother Viy, the Tsar of death, turns up uninvited at the marriage and thereafter there will be war between the brothers.

Birds or eggs occur frequently in the text. Marya kills a firebird; in one of her tasks she fetches an egg she believes contains Koschei’s death; a friend turns into a bird; she spends some time in a place named Yaichka which turns out to be an egg; Alkanost, a firebird-like creature, imparts words of wisdom; she is told the world tries to make stories turn out differently – as perfect as an egg.

In a sudden temporal jump we find a human man, Ivan Nikolayevich, wandering into Marya’s life. In the interim she has become one of Koschei’s generals, but the war is going badly. (The war is always going badly.) Koschei is dismayed as Ivans habitually take his wives from him. Marya chides him for his attitude and takes Ivan as her lover, despite his confusion. She tells him, “What passes between married people is incomprehensible to outsiders.”

Whatever her title may be, Valente’s story is not deathless. Escaping the war in Buyan, Marya chooses to return with Ivan to her childhood home and is shocked that a house in Leningrad is painted with characters from her story. With all the fantastical events that have gone before and come after, though, the impact of the German siege of the city and its attendant horrors of starvation and suffering is lessened. The stripping of wallpaper to make bread, its paste to make butter, are not as horrific, not as devastating, as they could be; as they should be. We have not felt, not been shown, enough of the long, slow descent into abjection and desperation that survival there would have entailed. That Koschei has also turned up and is tethered in the basement only adds to the distancing effect.

An interlude in Yaichka features barely disguised versions of Lenin, Stalin, the last Tsar and his family and a priest with whom his wife may (or not) have had a liaison. Two of these have dreams of a war between red and white ants. Russian history hangs heavily.

The human time span of the novel relates to that of the ascendancy of the “wizard in Moscow with the moustache.” There is the necessity to believe, “there has never been another (world)” – “can never be another.” An explicit message is that living under totalitarianism is like death; but a death where, “You still have to go to work in the morning. You still have to live.” But, to use one of Valente’s repetitions, life is like that.

This is what it says on the tin â a book of SF by Japanese authors. Whether this is the best of Japanese Science Fiction I canât say because my knowledge of Japanese SF is restricted – shamefully, perhaps – to this book. This was one of my main reasons for picking it up and handing over money for its contents. Most SF published is written from either a US, a UK, or other Anglophone perspective or else is European. Japanese culture is so distinctive that Japanese SF may be something other.

The book carries on its cover an encomium from Analog, âBUY IT. Buy it in such quantities that the editors and publisher will bring us more.â Sadly people must not have bought it in quantity as I believe no such follow up ever appeared. Below are potted comments on each story.

The Flood by Kobo Abe, translated by Lane Dunlop.
Narrated in the style of a fable, this story features the mass liquefaction of people and the consequences of that transformation.

Cardboard Box by Ryo Hanmura, translated by David Lewis.
Imagine all the existential pleasures and angst of living as a cardboard box that is aware of itself and its surroundings. The joys of being filled; the emptiness otherwise. You donât have to. This story does it for you.

Tansu by Ryo Hanmura, translated by Shimizu Mitomi, Joel Dames, Stephen Davis and Grania Davis.
A man is driven to distraction by his large family one by one taking to spending their nights on an old wooden chest.

Bokko-Chan by Shinichi Hoshi, translated by Noriyoshi Saito.
Bokko-Chan is a robot in the form of a beautiful woman, built by a bar owner to increase his trade. Her enigmatic responses lead one customer into folly.

He-y, Come On Ou-t by Shinichi Hoshi, translated by Stanleigh Jones.
After a typhoon a seemingly bottomless hole appears where a shrine had been. The hole becomes a dumping ground for unwanted material of all kinds, nuclear waste, incriminating evidence, compromising diaries. An allegory of the dangers of over-consumption. For where does it all go? This is reminiscent of Ted Chiangâs Tower of Babylon but predates it considerably.

The Road to the Sea by Takashi Ishikawa, translated by Judith Merril and Tetsu Yano.
A boy who has never seen the sea goes in search of it. An old man tells him it is in the sky. He carries on regardless, meeting no-one in his trudge across a desert land. To reveal more would be a spoiler.

The Empty Field by Morio Kita, translated by Kinya Tsuruta and Judith Merril.
Told in a disjointed style with non-standard punctuation and many newly coined compound words this concerns a once green and pleasant field, now empty, where excited children and an old man await the coming â or not â of a flying saucer.

The Savage Mouth by Sakyo Komatsu, translated by Judith Merril.
Using an operating machine a man starts to replace all his body parts with artificial ones. What he does with the removed portions reveals the savage mouth in us all.

Take Your Choice by Sakyo Komatsu, translated by Shiro Tamura and Grania Davis.
A man pays a fortune to choose his future from the three available at a seedy âtime travelâ shop. Like others before him he chooses the world doomed to destruction. The process is a con but that isnât the point of the story.

Triceratops by Tensei Kono, translated by David Lewis.
The title rather gives this one away. A father and son see a triceratops on their way home one night and subsequently dinosaurs pop up all over the place. Everyone else seems to ignore the manifestations. To explain the sudden appearances there is mention of dimensional faults and time-lag universes but these seem more of a sop than anything else.

Fnifmum by Tensei Kono, translated by Katsumi Shindo and Grania Davis.
Fnifmum is a creature who grows through time, expanding into the future while contracting more slowly from the past; but he can access all the points along his body. Losing contact with his gene partner in the past he moves to the future and encounters two humanoids. The translation in this story has one awkwardness. What it terms âcarbonic acid gasâ is more usually known in English as carbon dioxide.

Standing Woman by Yasutaka Tsutsui, translated by David Lewis.
Mammals can be planted in the ground as dog- or catpillars, eventually turning into dog- and cattrees. A writer who has just finished a short story sets out to post it in a manpillar, who used to be a postman, and talks to him/it. Conversations like this are against the law. The writer then goes on to talk to his wife.

The Legend of the Paper Spaceship by Tetsu Yano, translated by Gene van Troyer and Tomoko Oshiro.
An apparently mad woman flies a paper aeroplane while naked. She is Osen, whom all the men of the village come to for sex, even when she has a son. The child, Emon, is burdened with telepathy and eventually blows away the cobwebs in Osenâs mind, discovering the cause of her madness and his inheritance.

Is there anything here that bespeaks difference? That we can point to as Japanese? Well, the style of a lot of the stories tends to parable or fable but thatâs not unknown elsewhere. There is a certain distancing, of us being told things rather than shown them but some of this may be due to the filter of translation. What is present is a sense of the slightly altered, the askew, the not-quite-right. By contrast with most US SF the protagonists tend to be reactive or passive rather than proactive. There is also a tendency to take life as being contingent and prone to oddnesses. While no individual story would appear too out of place in any SF anthology, as a whole the collection definitely has a different feel from an Anglophone one.

Lord is a Barbadian with a background in Science, English language and Sociology. Out of that she has produced a very readable, literarily aware, fable apparently based on a Senegalese folk-tale.

The narrative takes place in an unspecified country which feels more African than Caribbean. The main character, Paama, a marvellous cook, has left her gluttonous husband and gone back to her parents’ house. When he tries to win her back all sorts of misfortunes befall him due to his shortcomings. Mixed in with this tale is the gift to Paama from the spirits known as djombi of a Chaos Stick which has the effect of making improbable events less so, of enabling unlikely occurrences. There is one mention of quantum fluctuations but it is no more than a sop to a possible scientific explanation. For this is a universe where insects can talk and other-worldly beings like the djombi, twisters and baccou are unremarkable, or at least accepted. A certain djombi, deprived of some of his powers by the others, seeks out Paama to take the Stick and thereby regain them.

A title like Redemption in Indigo does rather suggest someone will undergo a transformation and this indeed takes place but to reveal of whom and why would be a spoiler.
Lord at times knowingly addresses the reader (the tale telling tradition embodied in the book implies a hearer could be the intended audience) or otherwise demonstrates she is in charge of the story she is telling thus lending the novel a literary air.

Having only recently read this year’s Orange Prize winner I thought I would try last year’s, and very good it was too.

the Tiger’s Wife is ostensibly about the life (and death) of the narrator Natalia Stefanovic’s grandfather but a recurring motif is Kipling’s The Jungle Book which he carries around with him and, as a young girl, enthuses her with. This strand of the novel is bound up with a character called the deathless man whose path crosses her grandfather’s at various times and whose encounters with him he relates to her on occasion. Obreht spaces these throughout the narrative, which is baggy and roams between Natalia’s present and her grandfather’s past.

The meandering style is artful and allows Obreht to collect together what is in effect a collection of short stories about the various characters whom Natalia and her grandfather encounter in the shape of their histories. This is a mainstream trait which usually has the effect of holding up any plot but Obreht’s writing is so fluid and natural-seeming that any such complaint is rendered otiose. The journey and the steps along it are engaging. The various wars which occurred during the lives of Natalia and her grandfather are never foregrounded but their effects and consequences are never far away.

The deathless man is, as his description suggests, unable to die but he has the ability to tell whether someone else soon will by examining coffee dregs from a cup he carries with him. This magical realist/fabulous element is echoed in the relationship between a deaf mute woman and a tiger who escaped from a zoo after a German bombing raid in 1941 and made his way to the remote mountain area where Natalia’s grandfather lived. As a result she becomes called the tiger’s wife. Despite the novel’s title, though, she plays a strangely small part in the overall narrative.

As far as the magical realism is concerned Obreht’s debt to Gabriel Garcia Marquez in particular is evident not only from the suggested reading at the back but also this quote, Months later, long after the forty days were over, when I had already begun to piece things together, I would still go to sleep hoping that he would find ways into my dreams and tell me something important, which is strongly reminiscent of the opening sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude but at least Obreht’s was in Chapter Four where its teasing qualities had to some extent already been earned. The forty days mentioned refers to the wandering of a soul after death, when the deceased’s belongings are left untouched for him or her to come back to should they wish.

In the very last part of the novel Obreht seeks to undercut the elements of fable in the relationship between the tiger’s wife and the tiger by providing a rational explanation for it. This comes across as ill-judged only in relation to the sure writing touch shown up to then.

Despite being a UK edition the book has Usian usages and spellings – candy, hemorrhage, gotten, epicenter, woollen etc – which seems somehow wrong for a book set in the former Yugoslavia. Obreht also employs that common misuse of epicentre as meaning a focal point. In what is a very worthwhile read indeed the addition of Reading Group Notes at the end including an In Brief, a For Discussion and Suggested Further Reading strikes me as crass, though. But I suspect none of that is of Obreht’s instigation.